Title: They Have Their Seasons
Characters: Tigress, Po
Summary: "She'd follow him into the fires of war, across the seas and skies, to hell and back, to the stars above."
Long before Tigress had even started to think of themselves as a couple, she'd already started to feel herself inexplicably drawn to him bit by bit as she continued to learn more about him, like flecks of iron to a lodestone. Much of how she responded to Po's presence wasn't entirely comprehensible, but it was a chore all the same to puzzle through the causes — she'd considered animal magnetism, love potions, forces of the preternatural kind at work, all of them wildly imaginative if not unrealistic.
Halfway through his second year as the Dragon Warrior she stopped caring that much about the why of her being together with him and started to ponder exactly where they might be headed with whatever they had going on so far. It wasn't that she hadn't any faith in the longevity of their relationship, but something a bit more elaborate than 'we'll be totally awesome together' would have been more reassuring by an appreciable margin. By that time Master Shifu had already taken to sending Po on missions with them in pairs, and whenever he got to go with her, Po would consider it more of a date than a danger-packed bandit camp clearing session. They were dispatched to guard the borders at Nanking once, and then down to Zhaoqing with a short stopover in Fuzhou. Ever the romantic, he'd rustle up improvised bouquets from the roadside fields as they travelled, wiry bits of grass slung from his arms. If they were lucky, he'd find a blossom or two and slip it right into the centre before he presented it to her.
They paced a fine line between professionalism and unorthodox domesticity. Back at the Jade Palace, they trained with each other regularly; more often that not, training was more of an excuse for Po to endear himself to her. He always brought something new and unexpected to each session, a bedsheet knotted around his shoulders like a cape. He'd have an overturned wok as a helmet and conduct a narration like a title sequence to a shadow play as he watched her. "The splendid Master Tigress gears up for her next manoeuvre," Po whispered dramatically as she balanced herself on the edge of the tortoise shell. "Boom! And she sticks the landing! What spectacular moves this one has! What a cat!" Back on the ground, Tigress had rolled her eyes and swatted at him irritably, trying to conceal her amusement.
She liked how they clicked together perfectly and imperfectly, as if the entire world were a gigantic puzzle and they were the two missing pieces that fitted right at the centre. They had their edges and surfaces, different in many facets, and she thought it uncanny that it worked.
"It's like sweet-and-sour soup," he'd tried to explain it to her on one of their better days, stretching out both hands and miming pouring ingredients into an invisible pot. "You don't really expect these two flavours to taste awesome together but they do." He looked up at her to see if she understood, confident, and wrinkled his nose. "Or something like that. I don't really know."
She raised an eyebrow at him, shaking her head. It was adorable, the way he'd always construct metaphors out of food. Anything else wouldn't be him at all.
Once, she chased after him into the expansive dark of a scattered tundra up north. They'd come across an uncharted village high in the mountains where there'd been a massive incursion as they were making their way back from an envoy mission late at night. He treaded through the kill zone, the slush and effluvium collecting at his trembling feet as she followed a short distance behind him. The air was sour with decay. Smoldering remains of houses or people and embers glowing golden in the snow and a thick layer of ash covering all that they could see. There'd been a young fox-cub, couldn't have been more than four years old, staring up at Po with eyes soulless and blind, a smear of burnt flesh and blood across his wrangled forehead like an anointment.
It was too much for him, Tigress thought. Seconds later he fled, and she turned to call his name, reaching out for him, but he did not stop. Over the cresting hills she ran and ran until the chilly air tore at her lungs and whipped at her face, wary of astroblemes and splintered trails scattering the terrain, and after a long while she caught up with him in the centre of a large grass field. They must have ran a good five li that night, away from death, from the ghosts of his past. She could see the silhouettes of mountains and peaks in the blackened distance framing the arc of the domed sky, the off-white quarter moon and a lake of swarming stars sprawling above where they stood. The night was bright but very cold and windy from a minor squall coming in from a few miles away. A susurrus rustled the grass around them at irregular intervals.
He had stopped and was kneeling in the dry dirt with his hands over his face, crying uncontrollably, the strongest person she knew broken upon a rock. Kneeling before him, she gently prised his hands off and brushed away his tears, feeling some incomparable sadness stirring in her heart at seeing him like that. Tigress touched his face as softly and kindly as she could, and told him quietly that they couldn't have possibly done anything to save them.
That was the first time Po kissed her, full flush and whole and beautifully tender on the mouth, his cheeks still matted and damp with saltwater. For a moment she had hesitated, startled, and with her head growing hot and the taste on him on her tongue, she leaned forward into the kiss, his name trapped between her lips like the space unfilled by words far too uncertain and raw to say out loud. Po's hands roamed over her as he sobbed into her mouth, made vulnerable by innocence and despair. In the starlight she moved her arms around him and brought him closer to her, breathing in as if she could take away the hurt somehow, as if she could siphon off some of his pain into herself. Bearing agony was something she knew herself to be surely good at.
It made her think of Gongmen City and the Shen incident and how they'd almost all died that night. It'd started there in the dank jail and on the pier with a hug on both instances, and then it had transitioned into larger things on their parts. Being around him gave her a sense of fulfillment and purpose she never found in solitude, one she never thought she'd been looking for all along. He was even more than she could've imagined from the very start — he was incandescent and unversed; the yin to her yang; the light of her life, quite literally sometimes when he'd set himself on fire.
When that year finally ended with the Winter Feast she returned to her quarters alone and tired and she pulled the scarf from around her neck and flopped down on her tatami mat. Tigress thought about everything that had happened in her life so far and felt a sudden crest of depression wash over her like a sneaker wave. Sitting back up and clutching at her ears, she closed her eyes and growled moodily, thinking it all completely crazy and pointless and none of it made sense to her. How she was so easily besotted — her, of all people — was a fazing thought. She loved Po without question, hankered after him with a dogged passion that burned hot and bright like a firework, very unlike her fleeting, lukewarm crush on Shifu when she was young. Forget simple infatuation; it was new, unfamiliar, frightening, the very same things Po was to her.
A couple of hours later he slipped into her room and laid a hand on her shoulder. Tigress shuddered at the sudden warmth, and relaxed as she turned and saw that it was him. "Everything okay?" he asked. She nodded wordlessly and smiled at him, hoping that he couldn't see the fear in her expression. "Well," Po murmured, bringing himself down to her. "Just in case, then." He hugged her tightly, clasping his hands behind her waist and pressing his nose against her shoulder. The way he loved her never failed to astonish Tigress, giving himself wholly and unselfishly to her. She wanted the world for Po, but to him, it mattered not that she didn't know exactly how much she could give back. She knew that he'd always be hers, and she, his, because he was that sort of person — someone who always saw the best in everyone, exactly someone she'd always wished she could be.
Whenever the darkness overtook Tigress and her heart brimmed over with anguish and she stood lost to everything, he'd battle alongside her. She'd follow him into the fires of war, across the seas and skies, to hell and back, to the stars above. At the end of each day she'd look into his eyes and see what had always been there, bury her face in him and breathe in life like she'd been drowning, and she'd never fail to be found like she always was whenever he held her, every single time.
A/N: The working title for this one was 'Seasons In The Sun'. The current title is, again, from one of Andrew Lloyd Webber's compositions, "Think Of Me":
Flowers fade, the fruits of summer fade
They have their seasons, so do we
But please promise me that sometimes
You will think of me
I also realise that by posting this I acknowledge LoA as canon. Talk about taking one for accuracy. As always, unbetaed and proofread solely by myself, so errors in grammar, punctuation and spelling are all me, and please don't call me out on the anachronistic descriptors; I've already judged myself three times and counting for you.